Is Avvo working for you or are you for them?

Platforms like Avvo, Yelp, and other attorney directories are sold to attorneys as means to help potential clients find and select the attorney for legal services. The directories provide consumers with a means to see reviews and rankings of the attorneys. At first the legal directories look like an easy and free avenue for attorneys to market themselves.

But, what are the directories actually doing for you? After the directory launches its platform, they sit back and let the attorneys do a vast majority of the work. You will probably find yourself spending hours of billable time claiming, verifying and optimizing your profiles. Your billable time is spent playing their secret rating game. To increase the value of Avvo’s site, Avvo actually gets the attorneys to post articles and answer legal questions online for unknown and non-paying consumers for free.

The thing to remember is that online legal directories are businesses. Directories are in the directory business to make money, not to help lawyers. The directories make their money by creating a platform for attorneys to compete with each other for clients. The more the attorneys compete, the stronger the directory’s site becomes.

Once the attorneys become dependent upon Avvo, the directory starts selling the attorneys better page location and display ad space. This is where the directory makes its money. We, attorneys, keep spending billable hours contributing articles, and answering online legal questions while Avvo sells us priority page position and ad space on their site that our free work has built.

Your page position on Avvo is not based on actual merits. No matter how much time you spend carrying out the tasks that can “raise your ratings,” you still won’t be placed above the attorney that is paying Avvo to get ahead of you.

Working on raising your Avvo rating takes time. Time you could be spending working with clients.

As an attorney, each hour that you work for a client is a billable hour that brings money in to your firm. The more “billable” hours you work, the more money you make. But working for Avvo is not billable time. Raising your Avvo rating takes time: Avvo’s secret algorithm; and your investment of your time in optimizing your profile. If you want to improve your cash flow working on optimizing your Avvo rating and page position is the last thing you should be doing. You should be going directly after new clients. The more clients you have, the more billable hours you have.

Any task that you perform that is non-billable time is money you are losing. The time you are working on Avvo is non-billable time. If you find yourself putting many hours each week into working on your Avvo profile to increase your Avvo Rating, answering questions on their legal forum, or creating legal guides, you are essentially working for free for Avvo with the belief that you will get clients from your hard work. You would have a much better return on investing with actual clients, not on optimizing your Avvo profile.

Divorce Lawyers for Men™, a division of Morris-Sockle, PLLC, is a network of family law attorneys and firms across Washington State. We contract with skilled attorneys who are looking for an efficient and effective way to build their caseloads. Over the last 10 years DLFM has generated over 31,000 calls from potential new clients and collected over $20 million in client fees.

DLFM generates the steady influx of potential new clients calls by operating a state of the art fully integrated marketing campaign. We market the Divorce Lawyers For Men network (not individual attorneys) statewide on the radio, TV, Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, and You Tube. We employee top flight digital marketing experts that create superior online campaigns.

By pooling the strength of a network of family law attorneys we are able to make media buys that no single firm could ever afford.

What’s more, DLFM recognizes success. The attorneys that are more effective in handling potential new clients are sent more calls. The better you do, the more clients you get. This links your success with our success.

There are no up-front costs. We are not a directory or referral agency. You do not pay the Divorce Lawyers for Men network to send potential clients to you.

Divorce Lawyers for Men is a business and component of respected Olympia law firm, Morris-Sockle. We make our money through fee sharing, with the majority of our share reinvested in marketing to bring you more clients and help build your success. What online directory has a business model that revolves around you being successful instead of them?

Frank Morris

Frank, co-founder and senior partner of Divorce Lawyers for Men, has spent the last 40 years litigating complex legal claims. He is a Founding Member of the WSAJ distinctive Eagle Program; a Presidents’ Club member of the AAJ; and a member of Million Dollar Advocates, Washington State Bar Association, Thurston County Bar Association, and King County Bar Association Family Law Section.